She Should Be Glad We Don't Have A Playground Here

The law school attendance policy is a source of continual irritation to me for reasons I’ve already gotten into on other occasions, both on the blog and in person. Over the course of the semester, I’ve added another reason to the list: it gives Kim (who, by the way, is at this very moment squeezing a zit on her chin in the middle of class) one more way to be an annoying suck up. At least once a week, one of my professors “forgets” to pass the attendance sheet. Some of us suspect a minor rebellion against the policy—I’ve heard several professors complain about the policy. It seems they don’t like it any more than we do. If this happens in a class that Kim is in, she makes sure to raise her hand, always in the middle of a good discussion or a particularly interesting bit of lecture. The professor calls on her, thinking that she has a question, or is going to contribute to the discussion, and she whines something along the lines of “I didn’t get the attendance sheet. Can someone pass it over to me?”, as if she wasn’t fully aware that the attendance sheet hadn’t gone around at all.

It’s like the kid in elementary school who would raise his hand a half hour before the end of the school day to remind the teacher that you were supposed to have a spelling test that day and even the kids who’d studied and were ready for the test wanted to challenge that kid to meet them at the flagpole after school and beat him up.

Why on earth does she care so much about the stupid sign up sheet? It’s not like they compare the number of times you sign the sheets and the number of times you don’t; the only thing that matters is how many of the scheduled class meetings you miss. If the professor forgets to pass the sign up sheet, it’s like landing on Free Parking in Monopoly. Nothing bad happens, nothing good happens. For the people who are absent that day, it’s like landing on Free Parking when there are hotels on all the orange properties AND all the red properties: you dodge the proverbial bullet. Unless Kim is in your class, in which case, the banker just informed you that you miscounted and in fact, should have landed on Kentucky Avenue instead of Free Parking. More importantly, she destroys the flow of class when she does this. The discussion is always derailed and the professor loses his momentum in the lecture. It takes a few minutes to get things back up to speed again. If all she cared about was making sure that she signs the sheet and doesn’t get counted as absent, she could do what the rest of us do if the sheet doesn’t get to us during class: you walk down to the front after class and ask the professor to sign the sheet. No harm, no foul on any side. Oh, that’s right: if she did that, it would mean behaving like a normal human being instead of a slimy worm.